Tell Me Your Story

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Tell Me Your Story Games Collection, along with Amelia’s Garden and Cook for Love.)

Tell Me Your Story is a Family-Friendly Puzzle Game released on PC, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2024, then ported to PlayStation 4 in 2025. This game follows a young girl visiting her grandmother as she helps out with various tasks around the house and fantasizes about traveling the world. Despite the game’s title, the game’s story (such as it is) is told without text or voice, conveyed only through images and gameplay.

Before going on, I should mention that this game was published by RedDeer.Games, and you know what that means – yes, once again, this game’s content has been ripped out of the game only to turn around and release it as free DLC so the publisher had the excuse to release countless versions of the game to flood the eShop. There are, as of this writing, 12 different versions of this game, all essentially identical, as they just include different configurations of free DLC. Just know that no matter which one you get, you can download the remaining DLC for free to get the exact same experience as any of the other versions.

This issue aside, the presentation here is quite good, with some really lovely hand-drawn 2D visuals with bright colors and an attractive art style that seems perfect for the topic matter, backed by a very nice relaxed soundtrack that gives this game wonderfully warm “cozy game” vibes.

The gameplay in theory is spot-on for what this game is aiming for, and that is a simple but varied puzzle game for younger children. Pretty much all of this game’s puzzles appear to be unique, and all relatively simple so a young child could solve it. Many of these take pretty common and familiar forms, like one minigame that has you matching leave shapes, and another that has you guessing the positioning of icons in a style reminiscent of Mastermind. Then there are some that don’t really qualify as puzzles so much as “activities”, such as washing dishes by bringing them one by one from a box to a wash basin to a towel and then to a cabinet – there’s no skill involved here, it’s just a thing to do.

All of this would be fine for younger kids (though dreadfully dull for a player who wants anything even remotely resembling a challenge), but unfortunately there’s a problem, and that is that Tell Me Your Story does an absolutely terrible job conveying to players just what it is they’re supposed to be doing. The aforementioned leaf-matching game had me stuck for a good 5-10 minutes as I tried to figure out just what the game wanted me to do, because tapping the leaves made them move slightly and make different noises, but didn’t seem to do anything. Was I supposed to make a pattern with the noises? Make them move in a certain way? There wasn’t any sort of instruction or signposting to indicate what the goal was here, and if it frustrated me, it’s guaranteed to frustrate a younger child.

Another issue I have to point to here is the pricing. Despite being the same game, the Nintendo Switch release of this game costs $1 more than the game costs on other platforms. The only reason I could see for this disparity is that the Nintendo Switch version of the game has touchscreen support not present in other versions, but I hardly see this as a good justification for the bump in pricing.

Overall, I think Tell Me Your Story had a lot of potential to be a good cozy Puzzle game for younger kids, but this potential is soured by some ugly marketing tactics, terrible signposting that makes for bad game design, and a cynical price bump for Nintendo Switch players. While I think the presentation here is wonderful, I really wish this game had gone through more playtesting before release, and I wish it was released by a different publisher.

tl;dr – Tell Me Your Story is a family-friendly Puzzle game following a young girl visiting her grandmother and fantasizing about traveling the world. This game has a lovely presentation and a good premise of giving younger players a variety of kid-friendly puzzles. Unfortunately, terrible signposting makes these otherwise very easy puzzles unnecessarily confusing, and being published by RedDeer.Games means there’s all sorts of sleazy tactics going on here to try to inflate sales. The result is a game I cannot recommend, despite its positive qualities.

Grade: C-

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